It also reminds me of the perspicacity of a friend of mine, who having endured Cuba's Castro, saw all of this coming, and not wanting to face it twice in a lifetime, left the country.
Excerpts:
Of all the things I despise about the Bush administration, the one I will forever loathe most is how they made morality a minority position. It was the standard operating procedure of the Bush years that ethics was considered quaint, that pride in government was considered hopelessly idealistic, and that morality was the stuff of starry eyed fools.
...I will remember the Bush administration not for any bold speeches, but for an unending sequence of snide, guttural croaks in front of podiums, in which the latest blasphemy against mankind or God is uttered with perfect assurance, or with a dismissive sneer, or with ominous opines on the motivations of those that think differently.[On torture]
The concept, after all, is simple: one should not torture potentially innocent people. Forget the more unambiguous version, one should not torture anyone -- we are not even halfway there. We can base the premise simply on the notion that one should not torture innocent people to find out whether they "know" something, and you would still find that central element of morality, of basic human principle, of Christianity or any other religion you can name, to be, in America, in 2008, a controversial statement likely to get you condemned as a fool or worse. If you are opposed to the torture of the innocent, you will face the wrath of fat, hateful radio blowhards. You will face condescending, patronizing, entirely amoral lectures on newly discovered legality of the acts from administration lawyers speaking from the editorial pages of our newspapers. You will be told that what you consider torture, what every other society including our own has considered torture up until this very moment of time, is not in fact torture, and that you have affection for terrorists if you think otherwise.
...
There were those that considered "preemptive" war an abomination; they were considered naive, and dismissed as artifacts of an earlier time with shamefully rigid thinking. There were those that thought bombing the cities of Iraq, regardless of the viciousness and corruption of their leader, under the confused banner of maybe al Qaeda or something was too high a price for an uninvolved civilian population to pay, regardless of the actions of that leader. An opinion like that was taken as evidence of secret sympathies for that leader.
There were those that thought the Geneva Conventions should apply; they were dismissed as rubes. There were those who thought those that were turned in to United States forces as terrorists should have, at some point, a trial: the larger voice howled of the danger of giving any voice to those people, whether innocent or not.
There were those that thought that, even casting aside evidence that torture does not work, even casting aside laws against it, even casting aside the impossibility of separating guilty from innocent in front of the teeth of a barking dog or using water and a rag, torture is immoral; for speaking such thoughts, the speakers become hated.
At the same time, we were lectured on the will of God from those that see hurricanes as divine judgement against tolerance; we were told that intolerance is the moral position. We were told that if there is even "a one percent" chance that someone is a terrorist, granting them doubt or mercy was a fool's game.
We were told, in short, that calculated brutality was a requirement of government. In the end, the greatest condemnation of the Bush administration is not that they believe that, but that they have almost managed to get us to believe it.
----Lastly:
If it were merely the war on terrorism, that would be something different, though not necessarily better, but in every aspect of governance we continually have been told that the ethical position is the stupid, foolish one, or that being offended at corruption is the childish position. No news outlets demanded answers, when the Justice Department was staffed with those loyal to party, not country; it was considered expected. The outing of a CIA agent as payback was politics as normal; the urgings to prosecutors to prosecute Americans differently according to party affiliation was for a long while presumed merely one of the perks of power. The task of rebuilding Iraq was considered secondary to staffing it with die-hard conservatives, even if they had not even the slightest bit of expertise towards the job. Scientific reports by the government were either quashed or the findings changed in order to fit The Approved Version Of Reality; it barely resulted in whimpers. Forget the difficult or controversial decisions, even the most basic ones were reduced to simple equations of party advantage and ideological loyalty.
